


the come up

by euphoriaspill



Series: moment of truth [4]
Category: On My Block (TV)
Genre: Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Brothers, Child Neglect, Cousins, Dark Comedy, Drug Abuse, Gangs, Gen, Guns, Molestation, Prison, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-10 07:44:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19902223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/euphoriaspill/pseuds/euphoriaspill
Summary: Cesar's cousins weren't prepared to raise him. They didn't exactly try their best, either.





	the come up

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laratoncita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laratoncita/gifts).



> happy birthday nenita!!! as a gift, you get cesar suffering, just as you requested!!!
> 
> blanket warning: a lot of this story centers around child neglect/abuse, the parenting here is legit awful. there's also molestation/attempted rape towards the end if that's a trigger for anyone.

When Oscar doesn’t come home one night, honestly, it doesn’t even ping his radar— he’s pretty tight-lipped about the details, but Cesar knows the score and he’s not a little kid anymore. He puts himself to bed without being tucked in—

(it’s not as babyish as it seems. Okay, it _is_ , but it’s not like anyone else ever has to know.)

When Oscar doesn’t come home three nights in a row, okay, maybe that’s more worrying, but he still doesn’t panic. He can take care of himself, or at least desperately wants to pretend he can. He cooks Kraft dinner on the stove (Oscar would be horrified by the fluorescent orange noodles, he’s got that shit banned from the house), he does his own homework without anyone checking it over, he goes to school and smiles real bright, nothing’s wrong, the way he did after his mom was arrested and didn’t want the state to find out what went down.

When Oscar doesn’t come home on the fifth night, Oscar’s girlfriend barrels through the door like the cops are right behind her, slams it shut and sinks straight down to the floor. That’s when she notices him sitting on their beat-up couch, Nick at Nite blaring, and she rushes right at him, pulling him into a hug that bruises, crying into his hair. He’s too startled to react at first.

“God, Cesar, baby,” Rosita says, “it’s gonna be okay. Everything’s gonna be okay, I promise, everything’s gonna be—“

Nobody ever says that when they mean it. Nobody has to.

* * *

“What the hell are we gonna do about the kid?” Diego spits a wad of chew into the fire and leans back in the lawn chair, his eyes narrow and shrewd. Cesar hangs around the cooler with the beer, a ghost, unnoticed. He’s used to being seen and not heard, with the Santos.

“The kid?”

“Cesar, _burro_. Their mom’s a crackhead, their dad ran out years ago. He can’t just live by himself, if Oscar gets convicted.”

“Not my problem. Isn’t that what DFS is for?” Nacho takes another swig out of the can and finishes it off, crumples it in his big fist. He throws it aside, onto the ground to join a growing pile.

“Great idea. Then we can have social services checking everyone’s crib out, tryna figure out why we’re cutting him loose.” Diego’s usually hard voice softens. “He’s one of us. He’s a _Santo_.”

“Some ten-year-old kid ain’t no Santo.” Nacho sounds like tires crunching on broken glass. “He’s gonna need food. He’s gonna need clothes. He’s gonna need his ass wiped. I don’t have time for none of that shit, man, neither does anyone else.”

“I don’t need taking care of.”

They both stare at him from their lawn chairs, like they forgot he was there at all. Nacho aims a slap at the back of his head; he easily dodges. “Get outta here, _chismoso_ , mind your business.”

“Fuck you.”

“What’d you just say to me?” Nacho grabs a fistful of his hair, yanks hard enough that the the roots strain against his scalp. “The fuck did you just say to me, _ese_?”

Cesar struggles to get himself loose from Nacho’s grip, is secretly a little too pleased when he succeeds. “I don’t gotta be taken care of,” he says. “I’m ten already, nobody needs to _wipe my ass_.” He holds his head up, too, as he shoots a death glare at Nacho. "I'm not gonna live in a foster home. I'll run away and come back."

“Maybe he can crash with me and Jesús for a while.” Ángel shrugs one shoulder, doesn’t look at him as he says it. “I mean, not a _while_. A week, maybe, ‘til we figure out what the situation’s like.” He nudges Cesar with the toe of his torn sneaker. “Go get your shit, _ese_ , meet us in the car.”

Cesar’s only just in double digits, but he's not stupid. He knows even now how many years a week is going to stretch into, as little as he wants to admit it to himself. He packs everything he can fit into Oscar’s old duffel bag.

* * *

Oscar tried, after their mom left for good, to do what other parents did— go to conferences with teachers, make nutritious meals, check Cesar’s homework, all that kind of stuff. Maybe he had a dangerously short fuse and left him to his own devices too much and had a pretty loose definition of what was child-appropriate, but between him and Rosita, he was never growing up feral.

Jesús and Ángel, it takes him a couple days to learn, really don’t give two shits about any of that.

“Whatever the fuck you want, Lil’ Spooky,” is their response to just about anything, accompanied by an incredulous smirk, like they can’t believe Oscar ever said different. When to go to sleep, what to have for dinner, whether he’s home or not, if he has to go to school even— it’s all met with the same general apathy, except for the couple of times a social worker showed up to do a cursory check on them. It takes Cesar a depressingly short amount of time to figure out that they get a five hundred dollar check from the state every month. “There’s no rules in this house, relax. What’d Oscar do, beat you with a goddamn chancla?”

“No.” Cesar slides into the lawn chair next to him, the cheap plastic as hot under his legs as a supernova in the summer sun; Jesús raises his weight above his head again. “He didn’t do shit like that—“

But it falls on deaf ears, until Rosita shows up for dinner and finds him with a Bud Light in hand.

“He’s in _fourth grade_ , you fucking— _hijo de puta_ , you have to at least remember to _feed_ him!” Cesar walks into the kitchen for a glass of water to find Rosita whaling on Jesús, slapping at his arms while he smirks at her. “He’s walking around in dirty clothes, going hungry, homework’s never done, _you give him booze_ — do you want to call up CPS? Tell them you’re in over your heads?”

“Keep your mouth shut, _chismosa_ , don’t even talk about shit like that.” She’s been here slapping at him for a solid minute, and only then does he grab her by the wrists and toss her back into the counter. “Spooky’s kid belongs with us.”

“Then you better start taking care of him, or one of his teachers will.”

They don’t listen, though, and she never follows through on what she threatened. She stops coming around, for the most part, after a few months— either because Jesús and Ángel refuse to let her back into the house, or because it’s too painful for her to keep in touch. She’s got a new man now, Tomás, better-looking than Oscar but with harder eyes. That’s probably why.

* * *

Oscar gets sentenced to four years for aggravated battery and possession. Nobody was willing to drive him to the courthouse, or even tell him directly. He finds out listening to his cousins gossip on the front lawn, and runs straight to his room after.

“Why you actin’ like a _maricón_ , huh?” Jesús doesn’t say it harsh, neither one of them knows how how to be; he rests a hand on Cesar’s trembling back. “People get locked up all the time, your mom was—“

That’s when Cesar bursts into tears, and Jesús walks back in with a bottle of NyQuil, slaps it on the bedside table. “Drink this, come on. Just don’t take no more than the dose. You’ll freak out, homie, start thinking there’s lizards crawling up the walls and shit.”

It doesn’t become a habit, he’s too young for that, even growing up like this. But that’s about as much comforting as he ever gets.

* * *

Jesús and Ángel don’t drive him out to Corcoran much anymore; at first it was every month, pretty reliably, then every couple, then the spaces between visits just keep getting longer and longer and he doesn’t have the nerve to ask. By the time he’s going on thirteen, it’s been six months since he last saw him, and it’s one hell of a shock when Ángel rolls up in his convertible and tells him where they’re going.

“Spooky wants to see you, lil’ man, don’t look like you’re boutta shit yourself." Ángel takes his hand off the wheel to spark a blunt, passes it off to Cesar after taking a couple drags. “Gonna be your birthday soon, he ain’t gonna believe how big you got all of a sudden.”

Oscar looks different, new, infected tattoos on his biceps, a more vacant cast to his eyes that Cesar knows can only come from hard drugs. He usually tries to hug him, until some guard shouts for them to break it up; this time, he hangs back, just gives him a distant smile and a nod. “What up, _manito_?” He turns to Ángel. “He been givin’ you any shit?”

“Nah, it’s cool, _ese_ , we don’t bother him, he don’t bother us.”

“You still in school?”

“Yeah,” Cesar says, picking at a hole at the top of his sneaker. “I get good grades.”

“I don’t make him go, he doesn’t have to,” Ángel cuts in. “He wants to see his lil’ friends, I guess.”

“He does have to,” Oscar says more sharply, then tries to soften it with a smirk that doesn’t meet his eyes. “Don’t want him to be another dumbass Santo who can’t add two and two together.”

“You talkin’ about me, _carnal_?” Ángel laughs, then clamps a hand down on Cesar’s shoulder— he feels pinned in place, incapable of looking away. “You heard what Cuchillos was saying. On the phone witchu.”

“He’s young, he’s still a kid.” Oscar scratches at one of the new tattoos on his bicep— _only God can judge me_ — and looks down at the scratched-up table. “I don’t know.”

“Not much younger than we were. He’s smart, he knows how to shoot.” Ángel’s voice lowers to a whisper; the walls have ears, and more importantly, so do the guards. “Cuchillos wants him out on the street.”

When Oscar looks at him, Cesar remembers the night their mom got arrested, the way he cried as he sat down on the edge of his bed. _What if she’d stabbed you, mano, huh?_ he’d whispered, pulling Cesar into his arms. _What if it’d been you?_ “You want to be a Santo?” he asks roughly.

“Yeah,” Cesar says in an exhalation that’s all shock, like the gasp that comes out before he can help it.

“Good.” Oscar smiles at him like the rusted-over edge of a razorblade. "Doesn't really matter if you didn't, though." 

* * *

“Hey, walk much?” Nacho honks from his beater as he cruises past Cesar, sweeps the messy bangs out of his face, smiles. “Where you going?”

“Home, probably,” Cesar says. He already wishes Nacho would just hit the gas.

“Get in, then, I’ll take you.” Nacho unlocks the door and stares him down until he wraps his hand around the handle. “I’ve got shit to do there anyway.”

Cesar shrugs, throws his backpack under the seat and gets in; the radio’s blaring some old school rap he hates, but he doesn’t have the balls to turn the dial. “You want some?” Nacho takes his eyes away from the road, thrusts a dollar store thermos in front of Cesar’s face. “Go ahead. I got too much.”

“What is it?”

Nacho rolls his eyes. “Rat poison.”

“Come on, for real.”

“It’s lean, never had it before?” Nacho grabs it back and takes a long swig out of the bottle. “Fucks you up pretty good. Try it.”

If Cesar’s got one fatal flaw, it’s wanting his cousins to respect him as a man, not a little kid they got stuck holding the bag on— so he takes a sip, and another one, and another one, and suddenly all the sharp edges of his world seem softer and more malleable, and everything sure seems a hell of a lot more funny. He’s so busy laughing at nothing in particular, practically falling out the open window, he doesn’t notice at first that they’ve pulled up outside the wrong house.

“Are we having a party?” The sunlight blares into his eyes as he pushes the car door open; Nacho puts a hand on the small of his back as he leads him up the stairs, inside the house. He stumbles onto the couch, falls over, dizzy.

Nacho sits him on his thigh, the way Rosita used to sit on Oscar’s lap before he went inside, and that’s when he starts to realize something might be up here. “What are you doin’?” he says groggily, like he’s trying to wake up from a deep sleep and can’t figure out how to. “Nacho—“

“Relax, _compa_ , what’s your problem?” Despite all the lean he’s had, there’s a knife of fear stabbing his guts, cold and sharp, he doesn’t like the way Nacho’s hand twists in his hair. “Calm the fuck down. You want some more drank?”

“I wanna go home.” His tongue’s massive in his mouth, he can barely get the words out. “I should go home.”

“Who’s gonna miss you there?” There’s a sharper edge to Nacho’s voice now. “I thought we were having a good time.” His lips are over his before he can register what’s going on, sloppy and wet and tasting like cough syrup; he’s got his hand down the front of his jeans all of a sudden, touching somewhere only he’s touched and maybe thought about Monse— “Come on, Cesar, you wanna be a boy or a man?”

"I don't—" 

He’s never gotten hit before, not really. His mom sometimes waved a chancla around on the days she was out of bed, but she couldn’t be bothered to connect it to anything; Oscar only ever gave him the odd cuff upside the head if he was _really_ pissed off, liked to ground him and talk shit out more than using a belt or his fists. He takes a massive gulp of air as he hits the floor from the force of the slap, scraping his elbow as he slides against the carpet, and suddenly remembers why the only thing Oscar calls their father is _hijo de la chingada_.

Nacho grabs his crotch and laughs, thrusts his hips at him; Cesar looks up through the stars in his field of vision, doesn’t understand at first. “ _Maricón_ , you led me on, don’t play me. _Lo quieres_?”

He’s paralyzed for a few seconds, but when he starts fumbling with his fly Cesar gets up and runs, slams the door shut so loud it sounds like a .45 going off. Jesús and Ángel find him a couple hours later, clutching the rim of the toilet bowl, even though he’s vomited everything out and just spitting bile at this point; Jesús is too lit to care, but Ángel bothers to pull out a bottle of expired Pepto-Bismol and send him to bed. “You got one of those twenty-four hour bugs or something, homie?” he asks without much interest, sitting on the bedframe; Cesar shudders under the blanket, his teeth chattering, though it’s ninety outside. “Sleep it off.”

He never tells anyone. It’s not the kind of thing you talk about. But he’s never alone with Nacho after that, either.

* * *

“Aight, aight, kid, put it down.”

The guy’s a junkie. Like Cesar’s mom. He doesn’t want to think about it, so he focuses on everything else— the clammy feeling of the metal in his hands, the late summer heat, the way he finds crumpled bills in his pockets with a barrel pointed at him.

“ _Kid's_ thirteen and his aim's pretty damn good,” Jesús says with too wide a smile, too much enjoyment. “You stiff a Santo again, _ese_? You better sleep with one eye open.”

He runs like the devil’s on his heels; Cesar lowers the gun, the adrenaline crash almost dropping him to his knees. Jesús puts a hand on his shoulder, the most paternal thing he’s done in years. “Never sell on credit. You think a crackhead’s paying you back, forget it."

Cesar, he’s felt harder inside, lately. Maybe this is just growing up. Maybe this is what being a man is all about.

* * *

Oscar gets out the summer before Cesar starts high school.

“You a real G now, huh, homes?” He looks like he wants to hug him, but in front of their cousins, settles for a slap on the back that sends him reeling forwards. “Just wait until we jump you in.”

Cesar wishes he'd never come back. 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [it takes a monster](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21048221) by [starrywrite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starrywrite/pseuds/starrywrite)




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